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CWmike writes "Researchers at Rice University have demonstrated a new data storage medium made out of a layer of graphite only 10 atoms thick. The technology could potentially provide many times the capacity of current flash memory and withstand temperatures of 200 degrees Celsius and radiation that would make solid-state disk memory disintegrate. 'Though we grow it from the vapor phase, this material [graphene] is just like graphite in a pencil. You slide these right off the end of your pencil onto paper. If you were to place Scotch tape over it and pull up, you can sometimes pull up as small as one sheet of graphene. It is a little under 1 nanometer thick,' Professor James Tour said."

The problem with using Graphene for write-only memory is that you need Pink Latexene to delete it. Fortunately they've discovered how to make extremely tiny cylinders of Pink Latexene, mounted on the end of yellow wooden sticks, to do such work. The combination of the graphene on one end of the stick and the pink cylinder on the other promises to allow nearly unlimited read-write capabilities, for mere pennies, distributed easily worldwide.

I'm not sure thicker is better. I remember hearing that churches in northern England replaced their super-thick oak doors with thinner planks riveted together in a cross-ply design, as this provided better protection against the axes of marauding Vikings.

Of course, Ninjas are a different proposition, and five minutes googling gives me no citation for the monastic plywood theory, so perhaps direct experiment is the only way to settle this one - just make sure you have plenty of emergency Pirates on hand for back-up and it should be safe enough.